Date and Time

Location

Description

Joinery, joints and what they mean to us as crafting artisans whether professional woodworker or amateur.

In three hundred years of woodworking excellence, the world of joinery has changed very little. If anything, modern-day methods for creating joinery give both amateur and professional woodworker less rather than more when it comes to developing skill. It’s also true that creating hand cut joints remains the signature of fine woodworking. Here we explore the options and possibilities.

Joinery enables us to create a vast range of structures using wood alone to unite the components whether temporarily or permanently together. Paul sees and presents creating the joinery we’ve relied on for centuries differently than most and offers this series of key lectures with demonstrations to help woodworkers better understand the complexities and simplicities that relate more to our woodworking than almost any area. He wants this understanding to nurture our self reliance and the development of skill to enhance workmanship and creativity. In an age of woodcraft revival, we see how reestablishing the true art of joinery provides practical ways for woodworkers to engage in home woodworking at a new level. We also see that joints we have relied on through the centuries have really never been replaced by anything better.

Each of the three sessions has been developed to expand the vision Paul has for equipping woodworkers to work in the home workshop. He explores past traditions and unites the important elements of accuracy and sharpness with his own insights that guarantee the perfection we strive for in exemplary joinery. The tools he uses are both modern and old. Tools that survived alongside the joinery we speak of. Paul reaches back to the best of the past, unites practices and techniques with the present and reaches forward to a new future for woodworkers.

Whereas we want you to discover the art of creating fine joinery listening to the voices of the past, we also reach out to today’s woodworker searching to enhance any skills they have today and in the future. Just as crafting artisans in times past set the highest standards for us to glean from, we want a generation to understand that they too can work using the same standards and without compromise. We hope you will join your fellow enthusiasts and book your place on this new and exciting presentation.

The event will take place at Sommerville College - Flora Anderson Hall, Oxford.

There is no parking provided.

The guests can enter the venue at 9.30 the earliest. A sandwich lunch buffet and drinks are included and they will be served at the end of the talk.

Paul will sign his latest book, Essential Woodworking Hand Tools, provided you bring your own copy to the event.